In The City That Exploded Slowly, a photo-text series which will be screened as a slide-show in this festival, Leslie Hakim-Dowek maps out a personal ‘archaeology’ in the city of Beirut in terms of transnational negotiations. As in many family narratives from the Middle-East, with every generation occurred migration and in this autobiographical piece, she focuses on her revisiting over many years her place of birth and recording the many transformations of Beirut through conflict, reconstruction and sanitisation. The phantasmagorical significance of this urban space for her mother and herself is explored through the juxtaposition of old and new photographs and her own writing as a city that lives on within the walls of their imagination.